ALL NIGHT EMPIRES

Awake three years then sleeping, but even this would be unceremoniously ended almost as it began on that abandoned mattress out in that field where some of the kids go. Spent condoms and bottles, parasites furrowing in abandoned sugars and heat. The night was hot and dry and then morning came and with it a light rain. By the time they came across her the next morning  a downpour had come and gone. They folded the mattress up like a taco and just carried her off. You could hear the sound of their efforts for a little while, and then they were lost in the vegetation and the sound of birds finally resumed.

In several days the dull oxidized seep reached the firepit potash and was touched off with carminic acid from the legs of a local cochineal and it was utterly transformed into a brilliant prussian blue.

In early November the winds came, channeled and low and disunited and formed tall above the mountains yet, a shredding over the crumpled spine of the Great Smoky Mountains and down long chutes of white pine and bare sweet birch and almost visible against the stars, itself without temperature except in what it gathered. It was dry and thunder split open high above dry and empty and the sky was grained with blue and gray like dawn sucked backwards by some colossal reconsideration.  Sound became distant, the roar at last resolved into rain.  The houses under the wall of the mountain darkled in the first cold rains of late November, tall and huddled together like horses poised assward to absorb gray northers.  People seemed to be asleep, a vague reconfiguration of human confinement.  The first spits of snow flew at three thousand feet.

The town grew smaller. The windows outnumbered doors, although he wasn't sure what that was suggesting. Now in the grainy first light of Thanksgiving Day there was a sort of parlor despondency where photographs of the dead outnumbered the living and expectation lagged. Strolling with the revolver, now working and loaded, his father's huge stevedore greatcoat clenched around him with its own immutable gravity, Will suspected that St Bonaventure as a whole was made up of people who would not mind (being shot) never waking (and that he was losing responsibility for these illusions).

By December his plans moved beyond the scope of his anxiety and he had little choice but to act. The phone began ringing. He was surprised that women alone were responding and in these responses he was reacquainted with the enormous lien of time. He wasted through the first several prospects merely getting up to speed. He was surprised by his own rudeness. He was unwilling to discuss base strategies or timetables, lapsed into brooding silences, offered no refreshments. They left openly bewildered, hostile.  Their anger was a fundamental incentive. He sipped his coffee, watched them to their cars. He marveled over what sort of disappointments in their lives could have led them to his door.

By the end of March he was aware that a woman called Min Reclay would somehow be bound up with him until death and the possibilities were numerous and not altogether untragic but this was eased by the copper cast of her skin and her odor of bathsteam and the hospitality basket of fresh pastries, fruit and tiny bottles of vanilla refilled with armagnac and rye whiskey brought out of the backseat of her 72 Dodge Rambler with South Dakota plates. She was tall and preternaturally clean and called him Willcroe almost as an aside with her cyan-red lips and when the conversation lagged he could just make out the sound of her skin against the coarse weave of her shirt. In the hard low afternoon light of the kitchen he watched the shadow of his head move across her and felt his heart luff and sag and the agonizing humiliation of his age and he was amazed he could speak at all.

She moved in some two hours later carrying her few bags to the room she had picked out, Emily’s old room, just off  the kitchen.

That evening she worked on her car till late and he put Bessie Smith on his 1915 Victor Victrola and brought her a beer and stayed on the porch and tilled his tulip soil with his fingers and watched her move in this arrangement. She’d pulled on ratty coveralls and had the airhorn off the carburetor and her beer balanced on the radiator cap and he wondered what conventions should apply and how he should look at her or if he should at all. Her pale gray coveralls glowed in the dusk. He looked at the soil and saw that two of his fingers were stuck in August’s empty eye sockets, the skull papery and polished.

‘Nobody in town can bake a sweet jelly roll like mine, like mine
No other one in town can bake a sweet jelly roll so fine, so fine
It’s worth lots of dough, the boys tell me so
It’s fresh every day, you’ll hear ‘em all say
Don’t be no dunce, just try it once
You’ll be right in line
Somebody told me I made the best jelly roll in town, I say in town
You must admit that I’m a jelly roll bakin’ hound, bakin’ hound
Good jelly roll, jelly roll is so hard to find
We always get the other kind
Nobody in town can bake a sweet jelly roll like mine’

I didn't go to work today
swollen joints and a little flushed
embarrassing erection if you insist
but you never insist
instead stayed in until sunset too late
and too awkward to drag everything up the cellar stairs and into the sun

I didn't sleep last night
couldn't find the primer on numb,
or my self help flashcards or adjustment wiki,
glossy particulars and laminated sums
Sleeping is no sleep you'd recognize, you just wait
til my snore learns to pronounce your name

Couldn't drag a woman to the end of the peninsula today
Point No Point a storm found the one hole I never sought
Flies in the face of my engineered drawings and
Westernmost reckonings
westernmost point of no idea I ever thought
was too tedious to throw out and not rampant enough to name

The spring they broke out of the porn underworld both her graveled voice and his complexion cleared. His transitional tattoos of carpet burns, leather snerds, hair whips. Her roller derby arias invoking god and apocalypse, a glass flaminco grinning upside down on the nightstand. The spring they broke out of the porn underworld he still vomited off camera (so to speak) but this would pass.
She dropped the name of Jane Doe but he kept Dick Gravity, at least for a while, until he found the name was inappropriate when not wielding his phallus in a flail of carnal siege.
When the name went so it seemed a part of him went but there were no tears; the only critical aspect was whether to reinvent himself before or after he bought his first guitar.

This was 1977 and they lived in New York at the time and the possibility of unconditional ruin seemed exciting. There was money saved from the salad days of Ass Captain v. California and Buttamungous and so he couldn’t begin to express his lack of interest in work to the small succession of interviewers who considered him over his carelessly optimistic resume. By night from within the security of leather-soled socks he honed a truculent discourse on the futility of American labor to Jane, who had momentarily taken back the name June and all the Lutheran impatience of her Minnesotan upbringing, who at one point responded I sure hope your mule knows the way home.

Most afternoons he took his coffee to the stoop on Bleeker and watched the show, the city, from within the anonymity of his latent southern surrender. He wore pajamas and chinese slippers as if to supplant the street with a proprietary immediacy, as of gazebos or outhouses. He sat and smoked and sipped coffee and the pretended to do the crossword in order to watch street performers and musicians and poets and the homeless and even vendors demonstrate in the classic mode and he made note of their dress and their syntax and of the lines between harassment and solicitation, the convulsing symmetry of violence and participation. From this morass of manifest identity arose the distinct. There was a large black man who caught his eye who sold rubs of his hairless belly for a quarter and there was a junkie mime whose work consisted of muscle amnesia and strategic unconsciousness and there was a blind traveling autoharpist with a potted sunflower picked clean by the cynical in a red flyer wagon harnessed to a malnourished shepherd with a sign saying Without you I’m nothing.

All this was salvageable.

He happened upon the name of Billy Noe by way of regular plaints drifting up through the plumbing late most nights, a soft ethnic voice repeating Billy, no. It representing a hopeless and remote fending off of American Will that he found touching. On this foundation he began to assemble the subtle vanities of his character, the possibilities of assault.
He is catching up on this image, pursuing it. There are always clues. At his conception Billy is in another time zone, several frames away, a missing center panel in a triptych of age. There are clues, but frozen, immaculate instances but without anything to move them in time.

His mother, who will eventually be sacrificed to this all-consuming invention, knows her son. She visits from New Orleans, eating from a lapbag of Brazil nuts for her depressions. Ask me anything, she says. He does not.

Of her there seems little left, little real. By turns she is a blonde suburban, a black voodoo priestess, a Storeyville prostitute, by turns master of the vodka tonic, the root-doctor blues, the thirty -second minute. When he talks about her you can almost see the cave art on the walls of his skull. Images etched by eroding memory, sketches lovingly rendered in the pursuit of a dream.

the first one in
breathless and buckled up
a yip cinched up from the borrowed testicles of a recent dust up
step up the loaner, fall the borrower
all pinned together in awkward articulation
under a sodium arc moon

small gray hairs in the trailer, like so much unraveled nerves
meshing with the fireproof modern fibers
in the wig of a recent savior
or just stuck in the soap of a runaway girlfriend-
the latest in a series
to be punched in effigy
and pawned all in

The house stumbles backwards
and seems to sit down hard
mandolins start in the attic and finish in the yard,
in a sweep of pickled 3/4  time
floating over the weeds
where you can't go barefoot anymore
burnt or just hazy
relaxed or just lazy

The yard collapses inward
like air behind a freight train
offspring piled behind a blown out name or
cradled in the teeth of a dog
started and finished here
in a blister of standard time with no small ambition of
publish or perish
nor nest or nourish

Yes yes- we WILL retread your tires this year, and outfit you in a sturdy denim and wicking socks and push you firmly out and up

Up the avenue the leaves of the avenue will dissolve  into iridescent gutters, birds and primary colors alike will find default in the faults of late winter

as the exhaust boxes its own flatulent timbre in a blue grainy cloud held up with a coat hanger and yards of tape speeding off towards the new west

and what we find there
After 1500 miles your expression could read: drop in any mailbox
the skeptic of the single squinted hazel eye slurring along with the Wurlitzer and melting along with the novelty ice in
The corner booth with the greasy drink swords and other urban erratics that are only served in corner booths;

or the restroom on a midwest blustery el platform literally an alphabet-block shithouse where advice is apportioned with misshapen quotes like self mutilation;

or the footer of an obsolete text no one ever read anyway-

all hardware reduced to it’s purest form- lines, shapes, funnels and holes

Keep your receipts, tickets stubs and polaroids

all that track, follow and stalk might instead claim your prize as their own;
and the return trip is nowhere as educational

In the habit of sitting up startled at dawn proper, coming off compost dreams of rotted possibility. Will rose and went downstairs and made coffee and plotted. Thickfaced, brooding over his cup as if some cooling organ. Without his daughter’s income he would need money. He could get by but in the old dark of dawn with junebugs careening off the screendoor and Bob Wills on the kitchen radio he knew he would need. He muttered, grew aware of his muttering and stopped. After awhile he muttered some more.

In the afternoon he dressed from his dead father’s closet and went out saying nothing. In the kitchen Emily looked up briefly from the Friday paper at the slap of the screen door and severe steps departing then bent back over the crossword again.

He walked against the grain of east running avenues named after poets, looking down at each intersection into the utter bowl of the town as if from a high final circle, then finally descended Shelley into downtown from out of the sun. In his father’s oxblood loafers he was noted to stumble. At the postoffice he hired a box and gave such a confused account of himself that only the legally curious could hope to follow. He then went to the phone booth on the corner of Shelley and Paige and made calls to cities far and near, calls of inquiry and coagulating design and calls of hopeful exploitation and commerce.

He lingered downtown. Childhood streets. Once long ago and it seemed now forever 1938 St Bonaventure North Carolina. Redbrick herringbone streets and huge rusted Pepsi-Cola bottlecap punctuating faded stencil signs over brickedup businesses. Tides of unseen lilac and honeysuckle and gardenia weighed into the valley like depthsonor from dead concerned relations upon holdout poolhalls and saloons still rapt with an unambitious yet thoroughly seedy sort of sin. A woodfloor bar smooth with red evening sun and ancient trampled biles, spews and spillings. Silverback mirrors faded and dull as lead flashing, a view of the old textile mill reduced to a moody gravure through the soapy warped window. Old monkish liquors vaporizing at twice the rate of consumption, sicklysweet phlegms clinging to the punts of antique bottles, corks all but converted to rockcandy. Will Croe in his oldman’s custom doublebreast shooting pool like some ghostly vintage evening personified. A memory replete with appetite, extension shoulders and lapels enough to outmaneuver his better angels. A judgmental memory, drinking beer from filthy keglines, smoking, curdling. Eyeing youth, young trashy women about which clamored the probability if not the actuality of small grubby offspring. Drunken he floated untethered about the room in postures of determination, the waltz of a lunatic with a pointless glory, something about him suggesting survival against hardships or monsters that might never exist.

We finally come out at dawn with
the emergency phones ringing up and down the street,

-no particular order
like Stardust for
xylophone
and crystal tumblers

one headlight on the latest ornament passed out on the lawn
and one pointing up into the moths in the night
the car idles and you go in for the photo
and/or phone number
of the one that got away

Aeneas narrates, chardonnay and the oddly odored cheese gesturing at eye level, and he brays on this wholesome and futile bitterness, and the vengeance that was borne of it, crackers spraying throughout:

Blood ran in torrents, drenched was all the earth,
As gallerists and their alien helpers died!
Here were men lying quelled by bitter death
All up and down the city in their blood.¹

Aeneas coordinates evacuees, grouping them by waiting and by action, and many tissues are guttered and grants are pulled, while the buses idle:

All sleepy miners now,
projecting with eye,
reflecting on nil,
like a glimmer off a black exhausted coal vein

Aeneas dances and sculpts perceptions, and is rightly great with song:

Virtuous pagans, we!
Hoisting the Penates and yet
drifting down the river by twos and threes
we still sparkle, shimmer and shine
[repeat]

¹paraphrased from Posthomerica, Quintus Smyrnaeus